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24 January 2011

The BBC's Mark Kermode reviews Ron Howard's The Dilemma, which I saw in a pre-release audience appraisal preview back in October. Unsurprisingly, he likes it even less than I did, saying that it's '...not so much filtered by as infested by Vince Vaughn'.

Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord was an enduring French diplomat of the 18th and 19th centuries who once reprimanded an English visitor for gulping down a glass of cognac. "The first thing you should do," explained Talleyrand, "is take your glass in the palms of your hands and warm it. Then shake it gently, with a circular movement, so that the liquid's perfume is released. Then, raise the glass to the nose and breathe deeply." "And then, my lord?" his visitor asked. "And then, sir," continued Talleyrand, "you replace the glass on the table and talk about it." But, the visitor didn't reply, how will that get me drunk?

03 January 2011

Nasa scientists have named John Cusack's blockbuster 2012 as the most "absurd" sci-fi film of all time.

Experts at America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and Science and Entertainment Exchange have put together a list of the least plausible science fiction movies ever made, and the big budget 2009 picture came top.

The film, which depicted Earth besieged by natural disasters, featured ahead of two more 'end-of-the-world' movies - 2003's The Core and 1998's Armageddon.

Donald Yeomans, head of Nasa's Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, says of 2012, "It's absurd. The film-makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21, 2012.

"The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before."

Staff at the organisation also compiled a list of the top 10 most realistic sci-fi films, with 1997's Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman as space agency workers, winning the highest praise from the scientists. Nasa experts also named dinosaur movie Jurassic Park and Jodie Foster's Contact among the most realistic sci-fi films.